I feel so very fortunate that we got to spend six days in magnificent Costa Rica back in April of 2022, exploring beaches and jungles and volcanoes. A little over a year later, I am still so pleased with all of the amazing wildlife that I had the opportunity to view firsthand on this trip. It was a relaxing getaway filled with beautiful sights and great food! What follows here is the article that I wrote back in 2022 for a previous blog.

Dreams Las Mareas in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Province

Dillon and I traveled in a group of ten friends to Dreams Las Mareas Costa Rica, an all-inclusive resort and spa in the coastal Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. The resort was located right on the beach and also offered access to plenty of pools and all-inclusive dining options. The resort itself was beautiful, modern, and artfully landscaped. The food was decent. Our favorite was probably the Mexican restaurant, El Patio, which offered awesome enchiladas, chicken pastor tacos, a spicy shrimp tostada, and a sweet tres leches cake. The Hibachi restaurant (which you need a reservation for!) was also a fantastic experience and another one of our favorites, as well as an excellent diversion for a big group.

We spent many days by the pool sipping on delicious frozen cocktails — the Green Monster, a frozen concoction made with mint, rum, and tropical fruits, was my absolute favorite and go-to for the duration of the trip once I tried one. To be quite honest, I normally get bored sitting poolside and baking in the blistering sun, but it helped that I had a really, really good book to read. I was reading A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green, the second installment in his two part modern science fiction series (the first of the two books is called An Absolutely Remarkable Thing) about a sentient A.I. being whose arrival on Earth changes life as we know it. It’s bonkers and that’s the best I can do at explaining it, but I highly recommend — it’s eerily prophetic and very timely in 2023, in spite of the first installment having been released in 2018.

Excursions

During our trip, we went on two excursions offered by Amstar Tours & Transfers, which also provided our shuttle to and from the airport. The first excursion that we went on was the Arenal Volcano Rainforest and Hot Springs Tour. It was a long day, about 14 hours total with our guide, with a lot of driving to and from Guanacaste to travel into the forested Arenal Volcano region. In the end, I’m glad that we did this tour because of all of the cool wildlife and amazing views of the Arenal volcano that we got, but there were also a few negatives that you should be aware of if you’re booking this particular tour.

First, though, the positives: The boat ride across the man-made Lake Arenal offered spectacular views of the volcano, and we were blessed with a clear, sunny day. We saw a ton of birds and even howler monkeys along the banks. The lunch at Mistico Arenal Hanging Bridges Park was delicious. Everyone really enjoyed their food. I am approximately four years old and decided to get the chicken fingers, and they were actually (surprisingly!) some of the best chicken fingers I’ve had in a loooong time. The hanging bridges at Mistico Arenal Hanging Bridges Park are very cool, and we saw some awesome wildlife in and around the park. Nothing is guaranteed, but we saw a frog, a snake, sleeping bats, a coati, a glimpse of what I think were some kind of pecary / javelina foraging on the forest floor, a spider, butterflies, and lots of birds. No sloths or monkeys in the park, although we saw a group of howler monkeys on the way out. We saw lots of beautiful plant life, and our guide was extremely knowledgeable and pointed out a lot of living things that we wouldn’t have otherwise noticed! 

The negatives of the Amstar Arenal Volcano Rainforest and Hot Springs Tour: The dinner was a bit of a letdown; it was a fairly basic buffet at a local resort (not ours), and I honestly would have preferred the food back at Dreams Las Mareas to the buffet that we got, but the restaurant did have a really cool view of the volcano at sunset, and we snapped some great pics. Next to the boat ride, my favorite part of the day was the rainforest walk at Mistico Arenal Hanging Bridges Park, although it wasn’t exactly what I expected. It’s definitely very touristy and you don’t go deep into the jungle or anything, so don’t expect it to be much of an adventure. I was hoping for something a little more rugged, but this park seems to be geared more towards tourists / families / tourist families. I guess I should have expected this on a big group excursion, but I was definitely disappointed even though we saw some cool things! It also looked like there was way more to explore in the park than what we got to see, so perhaps if the tour had dedicated more time to the nature hike we would’ve seen more. You can’t really be too picky when it comes to nature, though; it’s all just being in the right place at the right time.

The worst part of this excursion by far was the hot springs we visited, called Titoku Hot Springs. This is probably just a Me Problem, because I had naively high expectations for some reason, but I honestly wish this hadn’t even been part of the trip. It was basically just a tourist trap with fake rocks and YMCA jacuzzis (but without the jets). The hot springs are apparently something you have to do in Costa Rica (or so I’m told), but this was not a great experience. I would’ve happily given that time up for a longer nature hike to look for wildlife. 😬

The one saving grace of this portion of the day was the fact that we saw a wild toucan high up in a tree while bathing in the hot springs! Also, they served drinks (for purchase). That’s always good.

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The other excursion that we went on was a local ATV tour near our home base of Dreams Las Mareas. This was worth every penny! Surprisingly, this tour offered the best wildlife viewings of the whole trip. We saw spider monkeys and Capuchin monkeys up close in the trees on the ranch where the ATV tour took place! No sloths, unfortunately, although they have one that sometimes sometimes “hangs” around. He wasn’t around when we went, but we did get to see a sloth on our way to the Arenal Volcano, so I was satisfied with the awesome monkey sightings that the ATV tour offered. Nothing is guaranteed, but we got really lucky! Seeing monkeys out in the wild was a dream.

All in all, our trip to Costa Rica was fantastic. I hope to one day go back and do it a little differently — next time, I would stay and explore the rainforest for half the trip, and then relax at the beach for the second half of the trip. This is, I think, how most people do it, but we were a huge group and wanted to spent the majority of our time relaxing poolside at an all-inclusive, so that’s what we did. 

P.S.: This trip also confirmed to me that we really need to invest in a better camera than just our phones, especially for wildlife photos. It’s on my wishlist y’all, so sorry for the low quality pics! I wish I could show you the toucan and sloth and monkeys we saw, but the pictures don’t look like much, which is why I haven’t included them here. We do our best with what we’ve got. 🤷🏼‍♀️